The Dispossessed in Palestine

BEFORE THE JUNE, 1967 war in the Middle East, not many people even knew that Palestinians existed. The press would make statements about the "Arab" refugees or there would be reports about "Arab" guerillas infiltrating Israel. Who were these people? What motivated them? Nobody asked. And people who sought an answer would certainly not get much help from the media. Since the war of 1967, there has been a lot of talk about the Palestinians. They turned to armed resistance. They were worth talking about. They were hijacking planes now. They were called "international outlaws," criminals to be severely dealt with. But nobody bothered to ask what motivated these men and women, what drove them to such desperate acts. One does not have to agree with violent tactics in order to seek an understanding of these events and of the larger questions at issue. Anybody who desires peace in the world in general and peace in the Middle East in particular will have to consider the aspirations of the Palestinian people.

There are about 3,000,000 Palestinians. 400,00 are living in Israel as an oppressed minority. About a million are under Israeli control in the occupied territories and another million and a half make up a Palestinian diaspora. Roughly 500,00 of the overall number of three million live in refugee camps in the occupied territories and in the neighboring Arab countries maintained by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

IN THE AFTERMATH of the war of 1948, more than 600,000 Palestinians left or were expelled from their homes. One of these refugees was Fawaz Turki, the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He and his family left Haifa for Beirut where he grew up in a refugee camp and slums. His book is an intense and vivid account of what it means to be homeless, to live on international hand-outs of a few cents a day, to be "an outsider, an alien, a refugee, a burden." It fills the cold term "Arab refugee" with painful reality. Fawaz Turki views his as an existential problem. It is a yearning for a homeland, for being part of a culture. "If I was not a Palestinian when I left Haifa as a child," he says, "I am one now."

The Palestinian problem is not just a refugee problem as Turki makes quite clear; it is a national problem. The Palestinian refugees have never wanted to be resettled in Lebanon or Syria or Jordan. They feel separate, they want their own homeland and a self-determined destiny. As Eric Rouleau, the distinguished Middle East correspondent of Le Monde, pointed out earlier this year when speaking at Harvard in response to an Israeli Jewish questioner, the Palestinian situation is almost a mirror image of the Jewish situation before the creation of the State of Israel. There now exists a Palestinian diaspora with a yearning for the restoration of their homeland. The Palestinians feel--and often are--unwanted in other parts of the Arab world. They want to live in and be part of their own culture. Like Jews, they value education very highly, and, despire their hardships, they can boast of 64,000 university graduates--only 3,000 less than Israel. It is one of the tragic ironies of history that Jewish nationalists--with the help of the Western colonial powers--inflicted the very fate on the Palestinian people they hoped to escape by establishing a jewish state in the Middle East.

As Turki traces his life, he felt the Palestinians had been betrayed by the world. They had been forgotten, they had become almost an invisible people, nobody even called them by their name--Palestinians.

PEOPLE REACT to these situations. The constant dependence on the international community for some hand-outs, for medical care and education, the humiliation of being stateless, of feeling unwanted in the host country may dull people or it may fill them with anger and rage. "The defeated, like myself," writes Turki, "took off to go away from the intolerable pressures of the Arab world to India and Europe and Australia, where they wrestled with the problem and hoped to understand. The reduced, like my parents, waited helplessly in a refugee camp for the world, for a miracle, or for some deity to come to their aid. The distorted, like Sirhan Sirhan, turned into assassins. The alienated, like Leila Khaled, hijacked civilian aircraft."

This is the backdrop against which actions by Palestinians have to be seen. They have waited for twenty-five years for the world to give them back to their country, but the world community has failed them. They are filled with despair that turns into anger of such intensity that they feel they must now take matters in their own hands. That is their only hope. The guerilla groups are determined to do just that. This development of Palestinians fighting for themselves brought for many of them a rebirth, a new sense of humanity. Turki returned from his retreat in India with a new pride of being a Palestinian. He felt part of the struggle against "imperialist oppression" and a sense of community with "brothers and sisters fighting in Vietnam, in Africa, in South America, in the United States and elsewhere...."

WHILE THE first four chapters of this slim book are autobiographical, always, however, with an eye on the wider political scene, the last chapter looks forward to what solution would bring a lasting peace to the Middle East, one that takes into account the national rights of the disinherited, dispossessed Palestinians. Turki sketches a tentative plan of a separate Palestinian state alongside Israel which would give Palestinians at least the right to national self-determination in part of their homeland. However, in coversation, the author has moved away from that position because he fears a separate state would just become a puppet of Israel, a pool of cheap labor and a market for Israel's goods. When writing his book, Turki was more concerned with the existential question of how to restore the Palestinian people than with political probabilities. He sees a separate Palestinian state at best as a stepping stone to the realization of a democratic, secular, socialist state in Palestine.

Turki's fascinating book is a very personal account. But he does not only speak for himself; he speaks for a whole generation of Palestinians, whether they grew up in exile, many of them in refugee camps like himself, or in Israel. It is clear that there can be no lasting peace in the Middle East that denies the rights of the Palestinian people. As Eric Rouleau said, even if the present resistance movement fails and collapses, there will be another one because we are dealing with a people's demands for self-determination.